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My Last Day Before Starting A New Career

Today is my last day of work as a
VelocIT employee, a company I helped
start and had (and still have) high hopes for as employee
#1.

No, I’m not being fired for blogging too
much
or embezzling funds. No, there wasn’t a big falling out with partners in
the company throwing books at each other and screaming expletives.
Unfortunately, nothing dramatic and tabloid-worthy like that happened at
all.

I simply lost interest in being a consultant and I
blameSubtext.
Micah Dylan, the CEO and Founder
of VelocIT and my good friend, and I often talked about the idea that
there are two general types of developers (I’m sure there are many
more).

Developers who are easily bored and love to learn about new
businesses and business models. Staying on one project forever would
cause these devs to go insane. They love the excitement of jumping
from client to client and project to project.

Developers who love to craft and hone a single code-base through
multiple versions. These devs are fine sticking with a project for a
long time and get enjoyment in watching the application take form
over the years.

For a long time, I’ve been more firmly in camp #1 with tendencies
towards #2. But over the past couple of years working on Subtext, I’ve
never gotten bored with working on the same code and realized I have
been in Camp #2 for a good while now.

Sure, I do get excited about learning new technologies all the time, but
now it is in the context of how they will help me make Subtext a better
blog engine.

Not only that, I found that what I most love about the Subtext project
is not just the craft of developing an application over multiple
versions, but the joy in building a community around that project.

Maybe this is because with Subtext, my "clients" are other developers.
I understand developers better than I do other clients because their
pain is often my pain. I just don’t have the same pains that a Director
of Marketing does (well actually I kind of do with Subtext, but I don’t
have any budget to address those pains so I ignore the pain).

My heart just hasn’t been in consulting for a good while now, but I
couldn’t leave while we were struggling along at the brink of going out
of business. So I pushed on, helped land a big
client, and now it looks
like VelocIT is close to having more projects on its hands than
employees! So if you love consulting and software development, send
Jon Galloway your
resume.

I will still be involved with VelocIT in a limited capacity. Discussions
are still underway, but I hope to remain on as a Board Member and
shareholder. The team we’ve assembled at VelocIT are among the best and
brightest I have ever worked with. I love working with them and working
from home. I willl certainly miss all of that.

So where am I going next?

I’ll be taking a position with Koders
Inc. as the Product
Manager of the
Koders.com website, an
Open Source code search engine. I think this will be a good fit for me
due to my passion for open source
software.

My goal is to as much as possible help developers become more productive
via search driven
development
and the services that naturally extend from that.

Naturally, the best way to do that is to provide relevant search
results. But beyond that, I believe that building an active community
around the site via tools, widgets, and APIs that developers can use in
their own projects will also be very important in being a useful
resource for developers. Koders is for coders and developers.

I’ll be relying on your feedback regarding the site’s usability and how
well it helps you to be more productive to help me do my job. In other
words, I’m going to take my lazy butt and try and ride your coattails
in order to do my job well. Is that genius or what? ;)

One thing I really like about the site so far is the project browser.
Check out the browser for the MbUnit
project.
Wouldn’t it be nice to integrate that into your project homepage, your
CruiseControl.NET build, or even replace the the
CodePlex code browser with that?
(hint hint Codeplex).

In any case, wish me luck. This is probably the most difficult job
change ever for me since it’s not just a job that I’m leaving, and not
just a job that I’m joining.

One funny part of this I won’t tell you yet. But you’ll laugh when you
hear the name we chose for our son, which we chose before all this
happened.